End of the Beginning

XV

KENZO TAKAHASHI WONDERED IF HE’D BEEN SMART TO MAKE SURE HIS GIRLFRIEND was all right. For the first few days in the shelter under the Sundbergs’ house, things had been pretty quiet. He and Elsie and her folks could go up and use the bathroom. They could come out at night during lulls and get avocados out of the trees in the back yard. They could even sleep in beds if they wanted to, though that was risky. You could get caught when the shooting picked up again.

Now, though, the fighting had moved east. Too much of it was right in this neighborhood. The Japanese special naval landing forces didn’t yield ground till they had to. By the pounding U.S. forces were giving them, they would have to before long. In the meanwhile, though…

In the meanwhile, what had been a quiet, prosperous residential street turned into a good approximation of hell. Shells burst all the time. Machine guns stuttered and chattered. Rifles barked. Planes flew low overhead, strafing anything Japanese that moved-and anything that moved that might be Japanese. Coming out would have been suicidal. Kenzo had long since lost track of how many bullets tore through the house above them.

Mrs. Sundberg cried softly. “Everything we worked so long and hard to build and get…” she choked out.

“Not everything,” her husband said. “We’re still here. Things are just-things.” He’d always struck Kenzo as a sensible man.

“What do we do if the house catches fire?” Elsie asked.

“Get out as best we can and pray,” Mr. Sundberg answered bleakly. “That’s the one big worry I’ve got.”

There were smaller ones. Mr. Sundberg had dug that narrow trench to a latrine pit. People used it when they couldn’t go up above. It wasn’t pleasant, or anything close to pleasant. He’d stowed bottles of water down below, but not a whole lot of food. Everybody got hungry and cranky. Kenzo also felt very much the odd man out. Elsie’s folks were polite about it-he didn’t think he’d ever seen them less than polite. But they and Elsie made a group he wasn’t fully part of.

Her father joked about it: “If you can put up with her here, Ken, you’ll never have to worry about it again.”

“I think you’re right,” Kenzo answered. He and Elsie slept huddled together. So did her parents. They had no room for anything less intimate. Mr. and Mrs. Sundberg didn’t say boo. They had to know he’d really slept with Elsie, but they didn’t let on.

And then the firing got worse. Kenzo hadn’t thought it could. Japanese soldiers were right outside. They shouted back and forth to one another, trying to set up a defensive line. They sounded excited and frightened, but still full of fight.

Maybe one of them smelled the stink from the latrine pit. He came over and shouted, “Who’s in there?” Elsie and her folks couldn’t understand the words, but the tone made them gasp with fright. Kenzo was scared almost out of his wits, too-almost, but not quite. Trying to sound as gruff as he could, he barked, “This is a holdout position. Get lost, you baka yaro, or you’ll give it away.”

“Oh. So sorry.” The soldier clumped off.

Elsie started to ask something. Kenzo held a finger to his lips. Even in the gloom under the house, she saw it and nodded. When Kenzo didn’t hear any Japanese soldiers close by, he explained in a low voice.

“I think you saved all of us this time, Ken,” she whispered, and put her arms around him and kissed him right there in front of her parents. He was grinning like a fool when he came up for air. Maybe he wasn’t such an outsider after all.

“Thanks, Ken,” Ralph Sundberg said. “I don’t suppose you want a kiss from me, but I’m glad you and Elsie like each other. I’ll go on being glad when we get out of here, too.”

“Okay, Mr. Sundberg,” Kenzo answered. He couldn’t have asked to hear anything better than that. If the older man really meant it… He hoped he got the chance to find out.

A couple of hours later, something a lot bigger and heavier than a machine-gun round smashed into the house above them. The shooting rose to a peak, then slowly ebbed. Kenzo heard fresh shouts. Some of them were the cries of the wounded, which could have come from any throat. Others, though, were unmistakably English.

“My God!” Mrs. Sundberg whispered. “We’re saved!”

“Not yet,” Kenzo said. And he was right. The fighting went on for the rest of the day.

As evening turned gloom into blackness, he heard a Marine outside say, “Lieutenant, I think there’s Japs under this house. I’m gonna feed the fuckers a grenade.”

“No! We’re Americans!” Kenzo and the Sundbergs yelled the same thing at the same time. Getting killed by their own side would have been the crowning indignity.

Startled silence outside. Then: “Okay. Come out under the front steps. Come slow and easy and stick your hands in the air when you’re out.”

One by one, they obeyed. Scrambling out of the hole was awkward. Kenzo helped haul Elsie out. It wasn’t quite so dark as he’d expected when he returned to the world outside the little shelter. Four Marines immediately pointed rifles and tommy guns at him. “You guys are Americans,” one of them said to the Sundbergs. “What about this-Jap-lookin’ fellow?” In the presence of two women, he left it at that.

“He’s as American as we are,” Mrs. Sundberg said.

“He saved all our lives when you were pushing the Japanese back through here,” Mr. Sundberg added, looking back at the wreckage of his house. That must have been a tank round through it: the hole in the front wall was big enough to throw a dog through. Shaking his head, he went on, “We’ve known him for years. I vouch for him, one hundred percent.”

Elsie squeezed Kenzo’s hand. “I love him,” she said simply, which made his jaw drop.

It made all the Marines’ jaws drop, too. The one who’d spoken before frowned at Kenzo. “What have you got to say for yourself, buddy?”

“I’m glad to be alive. I’m twice as glad to see you guys,” he answered in his most ordinary English. “I hope I can find my brother and”-he hesitated- “my father.” Sooner or later, they would find out who his father was. That might not be so good.

“Can you men spare any food?” Mr. Sundberg asked. “We got mighty hungry under there.” Ration cans of hash and peaches made Kenzo forget all about what might happen later on-except when he looked at Elsie. Then he saw the bright side of the future. The other? He’d worry about it when and if it came.

BY THE SOUND OF THINGS, the end of the world wasn’t half a mile away from Oscar van der Kirk’s apartment, and getting closer all the time. The mad, anguished fury of war seemed all the more incongruous played out in Waikiki, which would do for the earthly paradise till a better one came along.

“Japs can’t last much longer,” Charlie Kaapu said, looking on the bright side of things. “All over but the shouting.”

“Some shouting,” Oscar said.

“He pronounced it wrong,” Susie Higgins said. “He meant shooting.”

“Maybe I did,” Charlie said. “Never can tell.”

Plenty of shouting and shooting was going on. To any reasonable man, Charlie was right and more than right when he said things were almost over. The Japs were-had to be-on their last legs. They’d been driven out of Honolulu. Waikiki was about the last bit of Oahu they still held. Logic said that, surrounded and outgunned, they couldn’t hold it long. Logic also said they should give up.

Whatever logic said, the Japs weren’t listening to it. They fought from machine-gun nests and rooftops and doorways and holes in the ground. They fought with a singleminded determination that said they believed holding on to one more block for one more hour was as good as throwing the Americans into the Pacific. It seemed crazy to Oscar, but nobody on either side gave a damn about his opinion.

“I want to go out there and stab some of those little monkeys,” Charlie said. “What I owe them-” He carried a little more weight than he had when he came out of the Kalihi Valley-a little, but not a lot. You couldn’t put on a lot of weight in Hawaii these days no matter how you tried.

“Don’t be dumb,” Oscar said. “The Army and the Marines are giving you your revenge.”

“And the U.S. taxpayer is footing the bill,” Susie added. “How can you beat a deal like that?”

“How? It’s personal, that’s how,” Charlie growled. As if to tell him nobody gave a damn about personal reasons, a bullet came in through the open window, cracked past the three of them, and punched a hole in the far wall. The wall already had several. All Oscar and Charlie and Susie could do was huddle here and hope they didn’t get shot or blown up.

Oscar looked from Charlie to Susie and back again. As far as he knew, they hadn’t fooled around on him. He was a little surprised-Susie had a mind of her own, and Charlie was a born tomcat-and more than a little glad. He’d been looking for answers. Sometimes negative ones were better than positive.

Another bullet came in through the wall. This one tore a hole in the couch. Susie yelped. So did Oscar. The U.S. taxpayer was liable to be footing the bill for wiping him off the face of the earth. “Hey!” he said.

“What?” Susie and Charlie said at the same time.

“Not you,” Oscar told his buddy. He turned back to Susie. “If we get out of this in one piece, you want to marry me?”

She didn’t hesitate. She rarely did. “Sure,” she said. “It’s not like we haven’t been through a little bit together, is it?”

“Not hardly,” Oscar said. Charlie whistled the Wedding March, loudly and way off tune. Oscar made as if to throw something at him. He and Charlie both laughed. Susie astonished him by starting to cry. If the war hadn’t started, she would have gone back to Pittsburgh after her little fling. Oscar probably would have forgotten her by now, the way he’d forgotten a lot of girls. You never could tell how things would work out.

JOE CROSETTI SHOT UP WAIKIKI. The Japs down there stubbornly kept shooting back. It wouldn’t matter much longer, though.

Enemy troops were running around the hotels by Waikiki Beach and on the beach itself, taking positions to try to defend against the landing craft coming in from the Pacific. I’ve watched three invasions now, Joe thought. How many people can say that?

Naval guns pounded the expensive beachfront property. A long round smashed an apartment house to smithereens a few blocks inland. Joe would have thought nothing could survive the assault from the sea and the sky.

He would have been wrong. He’d thought that before, and he’d been wrong every time. As soon as the landing craft came into range, the Japanese raked them with machine-gun fire. A field gun in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel pumped rounds at the ugly boats struggling toward the beach. Joe saw splashed from near misses, and then a boat caught fire, turned turtle, and sank, all in the wink of an eye.

“You bastards!” Joe exclaimed. He swung his Hellcat out over the ocean-and one of the landing craft opened up on him with its.50-caliber machine gun, mistaking him for a Zero. “You bastards!” he said again, this time on an entirely different note. Fortunately, the sailor with the itchy trigger finger couldn’t shoot worth a damn.

And Joe spotted what he’d been looking for: the muzzle flash from the field gun. They’d put it right inside the wreckage of that big pink pile. He dove on it. His finger stabbed the firing button. Six tongues of flame flickered in front of the Hellcat’s wings. As always, the fighter staggered in the air; all at once, the engine had to fight the recoil from half a dozen guns banging away like sons of bitches. Joe controlled the plane through the rough part with a touch honed by practice.

G-force shoved him down hard into his seat as he came out of the dive. The bastard of it was, he couldn’t see what the hell he’d done, or even if he’d done anything. Every ten seconds took him another mile from the Royal Hawaiian.

Clang! A bullet slammed into the Hellcat. “Fuck!” Joe exclaimed. Yeah, the Japs were still doing everything they could-or maybe that was an American bullet running around loose. Either way, it was doing its best to kill him. Either way, its best didn’t seem good enough. “Way to go, babe,” Joe murmured affectionately, and patted the seat the way he would have patted a reliable horse’s neck.

He made one more pass over Waikiki. By the time he finished that one, only two of his guns still held ammo. Time to head for home. He flew back toward the Bunker Hill. They’d gas him up, the armorers would reload the guns, and then he’d be off again. It was almost like commuting to work. You could get killed in a traffic smashup, too.

You could, yeah, but the jerk in the other car was just a jerk. He wasn’t trying to kill you on purpose. The enemy damn well was. It made a difference. Joe was amazed at what a difference it made.

Twenty minutes later, his teeth slammed together as the Hellcat jounced home. At least he didn’t bite his tongue; every once in a while you’d see a guy get out of his plane with blood dripping down his chin. Joe ran across the flight deck and down to the wardroom to debrief. Things had become routine, or pretty close, but the powers that be still wanted as many details as pilots could give.

“Did you radio the position of that field gun so a dive bomber could pay it a visit?” the debriefing officer asked.

“Uh, sorry, sir, but no.” Joe thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Christ, I really am an idiot!”

“Well, you did have other things on your mind,” the debriefing officer said generously. “Speaking of which, you need to see Commander McCaskill in his office right away-‘On the double,’ he said.”

“I do?” Joe yelped. Was he in trouble for not making that radio call? He didn’t think he ought to be in enough trouble for the Bunker Hill’s commander of air operations to ream him out in person. “What for, sir?”

“He’d better be the one to tell you that,” the debriefing officer answered.

Apprehensively, Joe went up to the carrier’s island. He found the door to Commander McCaskill’s office open. McCaskill, a craggy, gray-haired man in his early forties, looked up from his desk. “Ensign Crosetti reporting, sir,” Joe said, fighting not to show the nerves he felt.

“Come in, Crosetti,” the air operations commander said. “I’ve got something for you.” Joe couldn’t read anything in his voice or on his face; he would have made-probably did make-a formidable poker player.

“Sir?” Joe approached as reluctantly as a kid about to get a swat from the principal.

McCaskill reached into a desk drawer and pulled out two small boxes. He shoved them at Joe. “Here. These are yours now.” Joe opened them. One held two silver bars, the other two thin strips of gold cloth. McCaskill’s face had more room for a smile than Joe would have guessed. “Congratulations, Lieutenant Crosetti!” he said.

“My God, I made j.g.!” Joe blurted. It almost came out, Holy shit! Now that would have been something. He wondered if anybody ever had said something like that. He wouldn’t have been surprised.

Still smiling, the older man nodded. “You earned it, son. You’ve done well.”

“I wish Orson hadn’t bought the farm,” Joe said, suddenly sobered. “He would’ve got these way before I did.”

“Oh.” Commander McCaskill also sobered. After a moment’s thought, he said, “I don’t think you’ll find anyone on this ship without absent friends.” Now Joe nodded; that was bound to be true. McCaskill went on, “If it makes you feel any better, Mr. Sharp did win his promotion-posthumously.”

“Maybe a little, sir.” Joe knew he had to be polite. Yelling, Not fucking much! would have landed him in the brig. He wondered how much consolation that promotion was for Sharp’s folks back in Salt Lake. They would sooner have had their son back. Joe would sooner have had his buddy back. “Absent friends,” he muttered, and then, “This is a nasty business.”

“It is indeed,” Commander McCaskill said. “But I will tell you the only thing worse than fighting a war: fighting a war and losing it. We’re here to make sure the USA doesn’t do that.” Joe nodded again, not happily but with great determination.

OSCAR VAN DER KIRK CROUCHED IN THE RUBBLE of what had been his apartment building. He had one arm around Susie and the other around Charlie Kaapu. They all huddled together to take up as little space as they could. Oscar had a cut on his leg. Charlie was missing the top half-inch of his left little finger. Susie, as far as Oscar could tell, didn’t have anything worse than a few bruises. She’d always been lucky.

They were all lucky. Oscar knew it. They were alive, and they weren’t maimed. After everything that had hit the apartment, that was real luck. Not far away, somebody else who’d stuck it out was alternating moans and shrieks. The cries were getting weaker. Whoever it was, Oscar didn’t think he’d make it.

No way to get up and see, or to help the poor bastard. You could almost walk on the bullets flying by overhead. The Marines storming up Waikiki Beach were giving it everything they had. The more lead they put in the air, the less damage the last Japanese pocket in the Honolulu neighborhood could do to them.

And the Japs were fighting back with everything they had left. That meant rifles and machine guns and knee mortars. If one of those little bombs came down on top of Oscar and Susie and Charlie… That would be that. Or a U.S. shell could do the job just as well, or maybe even better.

“Now we know what’s worse that everything we ran into when we were surfing at Waimea!” Oscar yelled into Charlie’s ear.

“Oh, boy!” Charlie yelled back.

Back in college, Oscar had read Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. He hadn’t understood it then. Now he had understanding rammed down his throat. You really could pay too much for some kinds of knowledge. If he lived, that would be worth remembering.

The Marines were only a block or so away. Oscar could hear them shouting at one another getting a new attack ready. With luck, this one would carry them past what was left of the apartment building. With even more luck, it wouldn’t kill his girl or his buddy-or him.

But he could also hear the Japs shouting a block or so to the north. It couldn’t mean… “They sound like they’re getting ready to charge, too,” Susie said.

And they did. “That’s crazy,” Oscar said. “They’d just be killing themselves.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the Japanese soldiers or naval landing forces or whatever they were charged the Marines. They were screaming like banshees and shooting from the hip. It was so spectacular, and so spectacularly mad, that Oscar stuck his head up for a moment to watch. Heading the charge was a senior Japanese Navy officer in dress whites: bald and bespectacled and waving a sword. Oscar had to blink to make sure he wasn’t seeing things.

Half a dozen bullets seemed to hit the officer at the same time. His body twisted horribly, as if it didn’t know which way to fall. His sword went flying. And Susie grabbed Oscar and dragged him down.

“Getting shot’s not how you’re gonna get out of proposing to me!” she yelled.

“Okay, babe. That’s a deal.” Oscar stayed down from then on.

By the noises, some of the Japs actually got in among the Marines. They didn’t have a hope in hell of driving them back; they just died a little sooner than they would have otherwise. They probably also killed some Marines who might have lived if things went a little differently.

After that mad charge got smashed, the Marines surged forward. Only spatters of gunfire answered them. The Japs had shot their last bolt. An American in a green uniform flopped down almost on top of Oscar and Susie and Charlie. His rifle swung toward them with terrifying speed. “Don’t shoot!” Oscar said. “We’re on your side!”

As soon as the leatherneck got a look at Susie, the rifle stopped moving. His grin showed white teeth amidst brown stubble. “I don’t care about you, pal, but I hope like hell she is,” he said. “Here. Enjoy.” He tossed them a pack of cigarettes and some crackers and cheese wrapped in cellophane. Then he fired a couple of rounds and ran on.

“My God!” Oscar said dizzily-and he hadn’t even opened the Luckies yet. “We made it!” Susie kissed him. Charlie pounded him on the back. Nobody stuck anything up where a bullet might find it. Oscar didn’t want to turn himself into a liar now, especially after Susie kissed him again.

THE JEEP THAT ROLLED SOUTH FROM HALEIWA down the twice wrecked and now restored Kamehameha Highway carried a pintle-mounted.50-caliber machine gun. The driver glanced over to Fletch Armitage. “You handle that thing if you have to, sir? Still Jap snipers around every now and then.”

“I’ll handle it,” Fletch promised. “You think I’m skinny now, you should’ve seen me a month ago.” He felt like a new man. If the new man tired easily and looked as if he’d blow away in a strong breeze, he still marked one hell of an improvement over the old one.

Fletch looked like a new man, too, in the olive-drab uniform that had replaced khaki while he was on the sidelines. The jeep was new, too, or new to him; none of the handy little utility vehicles had got to Oahu before the war started. The machine gun, by contrast, felt like an old friend. He could have stripped it and reassembled it blindfolded. He’d had to do that at West Point. If the instructors felt nasty, they’d remove a key part before you put it back together, and make you figure out what was wrong.

War had chewed up the landscape-chewed it up twice in less than two years. Not even Hawaii’s luxuriant growth was able to cover up the latest round. Fletch looked at things with a professional eye. The Japs had fought like sons of bitches, no doubt about it. Burnt-out tanks and wrecked artillery pieces and pillboxes told how hard they had fought. So did the smell of death that fouled the warm, moist air.

The Kamehameha Highway was better than new: twice as wide, with no potholes because the paving was still so fresh. The engineers who’d put Humpty Dumpty back together again had done a hell of a job. And they’d needed to. If supplies didn’t go south by the Kamehameha Highway, they didn’t go south at all.

No snipers fired at the jeep. Less than an hour after Fletch got off the landing craft, he found himself in Wahiawa. “Here you go, sir,” the driver said, pulling up behind the gutted corpse of a Packard that had sat by the curb since December 7, 1941. “Good luck.” He pulled a Big Little Book out of his pocket and settled down to read.

“Thanks,” Fletch said tightly. He got down from the jeep. Wahiawa looked-trampled was the first word that came to mind. The Japs hadn’t cared about civilians. To them, built-up areas made good strongpoints. The town had paid for their stand. Everybody in Hawaii had paid and paid-including, at last, the Japs themselves.

Civilians on the streets were scrawny. K-ration cans were some of the commonest trash Fletch saw.

K-rations weren’t delicious, but they were paradise next to what people had eaten while the Japs ruled the roost.

A brunette haole woman with her hair hacked off short as a Marine’s shrank away from Fletch when his eye fell on her. He wondered what that was all about, but only for a moment. She must have been sleeping with the enemy. His mouth tightened, which only made the woman look more frightened as she scuttled past him. How anyone could… But then he sighed. Some people didn’t care what they did to get by. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen that before. If your choices looked like screwing a Jap and starving to death, what would you do? He thanked God he wasn’t a judge. Making Hawaii run the way it was supposed to again would take years.

His own worries were more personal. He turned west off the highway toward Schofield Barracks, which he knew were nothing but wreckage, and, more to the point, toward his old apartment building, which he hoped was still there. A lot of the places around here were okay. The Japs must not have thought they could make much of a stand in this part of town.

There it was, battered but still standing. Just like me. Fletch started to shake. This was harder than anything he’d done since the first time he went into combat, with Japanese fighters and dive bombers blowing up everything in sight. And who says you’re not going into combat now? he asked himself.

Jane already blew up your heart.

ARMITAGE was still on the mailbox in the lobby. He climbed the stairs two at a time so he wouldn’t have time to think. By the time he got to the second floor, he was panting-he still wasn’t in great shape. But exercise wasn’t the only thing making his heart pound when he walked down the hall. He took a deep breath and knocked on what had been his own front door.

Maybe she wouldn’t be home… But he heard footsteps inside, so she was. The door opened. There she was, skinny (but who wasn’t skinny these days?) but still looking damn good to him. “Yes, Captain?”

she said-and then she did a double take right out of the Three Stooges. “My God! Fletch! My God!”

she squealed, and threw herself into his arms.

She didn’t feel skinny. He’d forgotten how a woman in his arms did feel. Finding out again was like three shots of bourbon on an empty stomach. When he kissed her, she kissed him back-for about three seconds before she twisted away. What had been intoxication curdled. “Hello, Jane,” he said sourly.

“Come in,” she said, looking down at her toes and not at him. “I’m sorry, Fletch. I know what you must be thinking. But that-wasn’t all about you, anyway.”

“Great,” he said, and she flinched as if he’d hit her. He did go in. The place didn’t look too different. It smelled of wood smoke, but she sure wouldn’t have been able to go on cooking with gas. “How are you?” he asked.

“I’m here,” she answered. “I saw you once, with those others…”

“I know. I saw you, too,” Fletch said. “I must have looked like hell.”

Jane nodded. “You did. I’m sorry, but you did. I didn’t think anything would be left of you in a little while.”

“Damn near wasn’t,” he said. “I was down to about a hundred pounds when the leathernecks raided the camp in Kapiolani Park and got me out.” He’d put some weight back on, but he still had a long way to go. “You made it, though. Way to go.”

“Way to go. Yeah. Sure.” Her laugh might have been dipped in vitriol. “Fletch…” She stopped, then muttered, “Well, you might as well hear it from me, because you’ll sure hear it.”

“Hear what?” he asked, ice forming in his belly. If she’d collaborated… He didn’t know what he’d do if she’d collaborated. Bust her in the chops and walk out, he supposed. Slam the door on this part of his life forever.

“They made me their whore,” she whispered. “Comfort woman, they called it. They stuck me in a brothel, and they made me… They made me fuck them and suck them, all comers welcome. There. Is that plain enough? I was doing that till the place got shelled and I could get away.”

“Oh,” he said, and then, “Oh, Jesus,” and then, “No wonder you didn’t want to kiss me.”

“No wonder at all,” Jane said bleakly. “Hawaii, the impregnable fortress of the Pacific.” Another acid-filled laugh. “What was impregnable was me, and it’s just dumb fucking luck-yeah, that’s what it is, all right-I’m not carrying some Jap’s bastard. I’d never know whose, either, ’cause there were too damn many to be sure.”

Fletch felt like sinking through the floor. There is a peculiar, horrible helplessness unique to the man who can’t protect his woman. “I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice. “I’m so sorry.” Part of him knew that was irrational. He’d been a POW, at least as helpless as Jane, and she’d dumped him anyhow. But he’d also been a soldier, charged with defending Hawaii against the enemy. And he’d failed. The whole Army and Navy had failed, but he didn’t care about that. He’d failed. It was personal, which made it all the worse.

“That ought to take care of any silly foolishness about getting back together,” Jane said. “You won’t even want to look at me now, let alone touch me.”

“Hey,” Fletch said gently. Jane looked up in surprise-she must have thought he would stomp out of the place in disgust. He said, “I know all about what the Japs could make people do. They would have killed you if you didn’t. You think I don’t know that, too? I saw-plenty, believe me. Whatever you had to do, nobody’s gonna blame you for it. I sure don’t. You’ll probably end up a hero, babe, and go to the mainland and make speeches about what a bunch of bastards we’re fighting so people in war plants’ll buy more bonds.”

She stared at him. “You son of a bitch,” she said, and she started to cry.

“What the-devil did I do now?” he asked, honestly bewildered.

“If you’d just walked away, it would have been over,” Jane answered. “But you’re-you’re sweet to me.” She cried harder than ever. “What am I supposed to do now? Everything that has to do with common sense says I ought to finish what I started. But then you go and you act sweet. What am I supposed to do about that?”

“Would you rather I slapped you silly?” Fletch inquired.

His sarcasm rolled right off her, because she nodded. “You bet I would,” she answered. “If you did, I’d know where I stood-right where I always stood. It would be over. But this?” She stared at him again, blinking rapidly; her eye-lashes were wet. “Have you grown up? Did whatever the Japs did to you finally make you grow up?”

“I don’t know,” he said heavily. “All I know is, I didn’t die, and too many people did. No, I know one other thing-I never stopped loving you, for whatever you think that’s worth. I couldn’t do anything about it for weeks and months at a time, but I never stopped. Take it for what you think it’s worth.” He reached into his pocket. “I’d give you a drink if I had one, but all I’ve got are Luckies. Will a cigarette do?”

“Sweet Jesus, yes!” Jane exclaimed. “I’m getting the habit back, and I love it. There’ve been times when I thought about screwing a soldier for a pack. There really have. That’s the other side of the coin. After so many, what’s one more, especially when he’s on our side? After you do… what I had to do, it doesn’t mean what it used to.”

“No, I don’t suppose it would,” Fletch said. “Well, I’m not asking. Leave me a couple and keep the rest of the pack. I can get more.” When she took a Lucky between two fingers, he flipped a Zippo he’d got from a pharmacist’s mate and lit it for her. He fired one up for himself, too. He was also getting used to them again. The nicotine buzz hit harder than he remembered from the days before the war.

Jane’s cheeks hollowed as she sucked in smoke. “That’s so good,” she said, and then, cocking her head to one side, “What the dickens am I gonna do with you, Fletch?”

“It’s your call, honey,” he answered with a shrug that he hoped hid his own dreams. “I never wanted things to end. If you do… I guess I can’t stop you. Think about it, though. Don’t make up your mind right away. That’s all I ask. We’ve both been through-too much. There’s no rush. If you decide it’s over, it’s over. If you don’t, I’ll be here-till I get well enough to go back on active duty, anyhow.”

“That’s fair,” Jane said, her voice troubled. “That’s more than fair, I guess.”

“Okay, let’s leave it there, then.” Fletch looked around for an ashtray. Jane was doing the same thing. She went back to the kitchen and came out with a saucer. They both knocked off ash and then, before long, stubbed out their cigarettes. He climbed to his feet. “I better go. I’m glad you came through… however it happened.”

“Same to you.” Looking like a soldier advancing into machine-gun fire, she stepped forward and put her arms around him. He held her, not too tight. She put her chin up.

“You sure?” he asked. Jane nodded. He kissed her, not too hard. Even with a mild kiss like that, he rose-he leaped-to the occasion. He was starting to feel well enough to know how long he’d gone without. He didn’t try to do anything about it. Letting go of his not-quite-ex was hard. Holding on to her now would have been much worse. He clicked his tongue between his teeth and said, “Take care of yourself, kiddo.”

“Yeah, you, too,” Jane answered. “I’ll see you.”

“Uh-huh.” Fletch left the apartment, left the apartment building, and walked back to the jeep parked on Kamehameha Highway. “Take me back to the beach,” he told the driver.

Away went the Big Little Book. “Yes, sir,” the soldier said, and fired up the engine.

JUSTICE OF A SORT HAD COME TO WAHIAWA. It was a rough justice, but the times it was trying to deal with had been rough, too. Jane Armitage knew that even better than most of her neighbors. Like them, she scowled at Smiling Sammy Little, who stood before his fellow townsfolk and tried to say he hadn’t collaborated with the Japanese.

Smiling Sammy wasn’t smiling now. The used-car dealer had on a loud checked jacket that he might have worn on his lot back in the days when Oahu had autos that ran and gas to run them. “I never hurt anybody,” he insisted. “I never squealed on anybody. I never got anything special from the Japs, so help me God!”

A woman standing near Jane aimed a forefinger at him. “Look at you, you lying son of a bitch! That coat fits you!”

People muttered. It was a telling, maybe a deadly, point. Most people’s clothes hung on them like tents, even after they’d been eating U.S. military rations for a while. The woman accusing Smiling Sammy had arms and legs like sticks. She was far from the only one, too. Sammy Little wasn’t so chunky as he had been when he was selling cars, but he was a long way from emaciated. He’d gone through the occupation on more than rice and turnips and weeds.

“Where’d you get your chow, Sammy?” somebody called. Somebody else added, “Who’d you sell down the river for your belly?”

“I never did!” Little said. “I–I had a stash of canned goods the Japs never found. Yeah, that’s it!”

The chorus of, “Liar!” that rang out had a frightening baying quality to it. Hounds might have bayed like that after treeing a raccoon, especially if they were hungry. Another chorus began: “The gauntlet! The gauntlet!”

Sammy Little licked his lips. The color drained out of his face. “No,” he whispered. “I didn’t do anything.

I don’t deserve it.”

“We can hand you back to the Army,” said the woman who’d pointed at him. “They’ll give you a blindfold and a cigarette, or else they’ll give you twenty years for sucking up to the Japs. This way, it’s all over at once, and you’ll probably live.”

Jane didn’t think anybody’d died running the gauntlet in Wahiawa, not yet. Yosh Nakayama went through almost unscathed; only a few people had wanted to take a shot at him. Most figured he’d done the best he could in an impossible situation. Other men and women, though, got badly beaten. They too probably would have faced worse from the U.S. military.

Two lines formed, from Smiling Sammy Little on one end to getting it over with on the other. The used-car salesman licked his lips one more time, then lowered his head and ran like hell between the lines. People punched him and kicked at him as he dashed by. He’d got about a third of the way before somebody tripped him. He went down with a moan. After than, a lot more of the punches and kicks landed. Jane kicked him in the ribs as he crawled past her. But he made it to the far end. He was bloodied and battered, but he was alive.

Jane kicked him only once. She despised him, but on general principles. He hadn’t done anything to her personally. When two haole men led out a small, kind-looking Chinese woman, though… “Here’s Annabelle Chung,” one of them said. Something made a crunching noise near Jane. She realized she was grinding her teeth.

“She ran the Japs’ ‘comfort house’ for them,” the other man said. “She took their money. She brought them to the women. She made sure nobody got away, too.”

“They made me do it!” Annabelle Chung said shrilly. “They said they’d kill me if I didn’t!”

That might even have been true. Jane didn’t know one way or the other. She didn’t care, either. “So what?” she shouted. “So what, God damn you! You enjoyed seeing us in hell in there. You enjoyed it. How would you have liked it if the Japs did a quarter of what they did to us to you? I wish they would have.”

Other women forced into prostitution screamed at Annabelle Chung, too. She started to cry. One of Jane’s fellow sufferers said, “Yeah, look at those tears. What did you think we did every night after the Japs finally got through with us? I spent all that time wishing I was dead. And I spent a lot of it wishing you were dead, too.”

“That’s right!” Jane said. “Oh, Lord, that’s just right!” Other comfort women also chimed in. The Chinese woman who’d been dragged into prostitution along with the haoles denounced Annabelle Chung as fiercely as any of them.

“I didn’t mean anything bad,” the madam said when something close to silence finally came. “I was just trying to get through it all, same as anybody else. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry you got caught,” Jane yelled. “You knew what they were doing to us, and you didn’t care.”

“That isn’t true,” Annabelle Chung protested.

But a fierce, rising cry drowned her out: “The gauntlet. The gauntlet! The gauntlet!” People made sure Jane and the other former comfort women had good spots. They hustled Annabelle Chung to the starting point. She didn’t want to go through. In her shoes, Jane wouldn’t have wanted to, either. A big man finally gave her a shove. After that, it was run or die.

People were harder on the madam than they had been on Smiling Sammy Little. That probably wasn’t fair; odds were he’d done more harm through the occupation than she had. But he’d been sneakier about it. He hadn’t been right out there pimping for the Japanese. Saying just what he had done was hard. With Annabelle Chung, nobody had any doubts about that.

She was already staggering by the time she got to Jane. Sticking out a foot was the easiest thing in the world. Annabelle Chung went down with a wail of despair. Jane yanked at her hair-yanked some of it out. She threw it aside and kicked the Chinese woman in the side of her head. Pain shot through her foot. She didn’t mind. It felt wonderful.

Annabelle Chung didn’t make it to the far end of the two lines. Once she fell, the comfort women converged on her. After they finished, she lay unmoving on the ground. Jane got a good look at her then.

Part of her wished she hadn’t; the sight wasn’t pretty. Even so… One of the other women said, “Not half what she had coming.” Jane nodded. She’d just helped maim or kill-more likely kill-somebody, and she wasn’t the least bit sorry. Maybe she should have been. Maybe she would be later. Not now, though. Oh, no. Not now.

A mynah bird hopping on the grass flew away before she got close. It was just a bird to her these days, not a potential supper. The same was true of zebra doves. The tame, foolish little birds would be everywhere again in a few years; the way they bred put rabbits to shame. She didn’t mind them. Their twittering swarms would help make Hawaii feel normal once more.

Normal? Jane laughed. What was normal after close to two years of hell? Did anybody on these islands have the slightest idea? Jane knew she didn’t, not any more.

From Hawaii’s worries, she soon came back to her own. What was she going to do about Fletch? That she didn’t disgust him still amazed her-she disgusted herself most of the time. Maybe he really did love her. How much did that matter? Enough, when she knew his flaws only too well?

Maybe. He wasn’t the same person he had been before December 7, 1941, any more than she was. She wasn’t the only one who’d gone through hell. He’d suffered longer than she had, if not in the same ways.

Did she want him back? Could she stand living with him? If she couldn’t, could she ever stand living with anybody again? Those were all good questions. One of these days soon, she needed good answers for them.

GET TING RESCUED WITH THREE HAOLES who vouched for him wasn’t enough to keep Kenzo Takahashi from being thrown into an internment camp behind barbed wire. He would have been angrier had he been more surprised. It was going to be open season on Japanese in Oahu for a while.

That was thanks to people like his own father. For Dad’s sake, Kenzo hoped he had got out of Honolulu on a submarine. He wasn’t in this camp. If he was still on Oahu, he’d get caught before long. God help him if he did. Better he was long gone, then. Even if he had collaborated, Kenzo didn’t want him strung up.

Hiroshi was alive. He’d been in the camp longer than Kenzo had. He walked with a stick and a limp-he’d got shot in the leg after the special naval landing forces dragooned him into hauling and carrying for them. The wound was healing. He tried to make light of it, saying, “Could have been worse.”

“Oh, yeah?” Kenzo said. “How?”

“They could have shot me in the head, or in the belly,” his brother answered. “I saw guys that happened to.” He grimaced. “Or the Marines could’ve finished me off when the Japanese soldiers fell back. This one bastard damn near did. I’m lying there bleeding, right, and he’s got this goddamn bayonet poised to stick me”-he gestured with his cane-“and when he finds out I speak English he wants to know who plays short for the Dodgers.”

“Pee Wee Reese,” Kenzo said automatically.

“Yeah, well, I got it right, too,” Hiroshi said, “but try coming up with it when you’ve just been shot and some maniac wants to stir your guts with a knife. If they gave you tests like that in school, people would study a hell of a lot harder.”

“I believe it.” Kenzo set a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’m glad I’m anywhere,” Hiroshi said-with feeling.

Like just about everybody on Oahu, they ate rations out of cans. Because they’d done so much fishing, neither of them was as skinny as a lot of the Japanese in the camp. All the same, beef and pork-even beef and pork out of cans-tasted mighty good to Kenzo.

People knew who he and Hiroshi were. They knew who their father was. Some of them must have hoped blabbing to the authorities would win a ticket out of camp. Kenzo never found out whether it did.

He did know his name and Hiroshi’s got called at a morning lineup. When they stepped forward, they got hustled away for interrogation.

“Your father is Jiro Takahashi, the Japanese propagandist sometimes called ‘the Fisherman’?” asked a first lieutenant who couldn’t have been much older than Hiroshi.

“That’s right,” Kenzo said-no point denying the truth.

“Do you know his current whereabouts?” the lieutenant asked.

“No, sir,” Kenzo answered.

“We heard he was on a sub headed for Japan, but we can’t prove it,” Hiroshi added.

“Uh-huh.” The lieutenant wrote that down. “Do you have any way of demonstrating your own loyalty to the United States of America?”

Kenzo wondered if he wanted to be loyal to a country that didn’t want to believe he was, but only for a moment. He thought about mentioning Elsie, but figured that wouldn’t do him any good-it sure hadn’t yet. “That gunner we pulled out of the Pacific,” Hiroshi said. “What the heck was his name?”

Hope flowered in Kenzo. “Burleson. Burt Burleson,” he said, and felt as if he’d passed a test of his own. He and Hiroshi explained how they’d rescued the man from the flying boat and landed him somewhere near Ewa.

The lieutenant wrote that down, too. “We will investigate,” he said. “If we can’t confirm your story, it will be held against you.”

“Jesus Christ!” Kenzo said. “We don’t know what happened to this guy once he got off the sampan. For all we know, the Japanese grabbed him ten minutes later and he’s been dead for months.”

“For all I know, he never existed in the first place, and you’re making him up,” the lieutenant said coldly.

“We will investigate. In the meanwhile…”

In the meanwhile, they went back into the camp. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with them after that. People seemed to think collaboration was as catching as cholera. Why not? The U.S. military had the same attitude.

Eleven days later-Kenzo was keeping track-they got summoned at morning roll call again. Off they went, to be confronted by that same kid lieutenant. He looked as if he’d bitten down hard on a lemon.

“Here,” he said, and thrust a typed sheet of paper at each of them.

Kenzo looked down at his. It stated that he’d been certified loyal and had full privileges of citizenship in spite of his race and national origin. “Oh, boy,” he said in a hollow voice. Hiroshi looked as thrilled as he sounded.

“What’s the matter? You’ve got what you wanted, don’t you?” the lieutenant said.

“What I want is for people to think I’m loyal till I do something that makes ’em think I’m not,” Kenzo answered. “That’s what America’s supposed to be about, right? This says you thought my brother and me were disloyal till we showed you we weren’t. See the difference?”

“Maybe.” If the officer saw, he didn’t care. “Maybe it’ll work that way one of these days. I don’t know. What I do know is, there were local Japs who played footsie with the occupation. Your father did. Okay, so it looks like you didn’t. Terrific. You’re free to go. If you want a medal for doing what any loyal American was supposed to do, forget about it.”

“What do we do now?” Hiroshi asked.

“Whatever you want. Like I said, you’re free to go. If you’re smart, though, you’ll hang on to those letters and show ’em whenever you have to.” The lieutenant jerked a thumb toward the tent flap. “Go on, get out of here. Beat it.”

Out they went. The guards outside started to lead them back into the internment camp. Kenzo displayed his letter. The corporal in charge of the guards read it, moving his lips. He grudgingly nodded. “I guess they’re legit,” he told his men.

“Fuck ’em. They’re still Japs,” one of the soldiers said.

“Yeah.” The corporal scowled at Kenzo and Hiroshi. “I don’t know how you conned your way into those papers, but you better find somewhere else to be, and I mean now.”

They left as fast as they could. Hiroshi grimaced against the pain in his leg, but he didn’t let it slow him down. Kenzo looked out at the wreckage of the city where he’d lived his whole life. He had to glance toward Diamond Head to get a notion of just where he was. Not enough still stood in these parts to tell him.

Later, he supposed, he would go over to the Sundbergs’ and see how Elsie was doing. He wondered how often he would have to display his loyalty letter between here and there.

“Free,” he said tightly. “Right.”

LES DILLON’S PLATOON CAMPED on the cratered ground outside Iolani Palace. Even now, they kept sentries out. A few Japanese snipers were still running around loose. Just the other day, one of them had wounded a guy near what was left of Honolulu Hale before the Marines hunted him down and sent him to his ancestors.

The stench of death lingered in the air. A lot of bodies remained in the wreckage. Sooner or later, bulldozers would knock things down and either get them out or cover them up. It hadn’t happened yet.

Somebody in a clean new uniform approached the perimeter. Seeing unfaded, untorn, unstained olive drab automatically roused Les’ suspicions. Another worthless replacement for a Marine who’d known what he was doing but hadn’t been lucky? But this guy walked up with an air of jaunty confidence and had a cigar clamped between his teeth.

“Dutch!” Les shouted. “You son of a bitch!”

“Yeah, well, I love you, too, buddy,” Dutch Wenzel answered. His hand was still bandaged, but he showed he could open and close his fingers. “They decided not to waste cargo space shipping me back to the mainland, so here I am.”

“Good to see you. Good to see anybody who knows his ass from third base,” Les said. “Some of what we’re getting to fill casualty slots…” He shook his head, then laughed. “They must’ve been saying the same crap about me when I went into the line in 1918.”

“They were right, too, weren’t they?” Wenzel said. Les affectionately cuffed him on the side of the head. Wenzel looked around. “Boy, we liberated the living shit out of this place, didn’t we?”

“Bet your ass,” Dillon said, not without pride. Iolani Palace would never be the same. Half of it-maybe more than half-had fallen in on itself. Somebody’d put up a flagpole on the ruins, though. The Stars and Stripes flew from it. Les figured he would start selling sweaters in hell before the old Territorial flag showed up again. Nothing like being used by a collaborator king to turn it unpopular in a hurry.

Over to the east, Honolulu Hale was in even worse shape. Being a modern building, the city hall was more strongly made than the old royal palace. That meant the Japs had used it for a fortress. After gunfire from tanks and artillery pieces leveled it, Marines and Army troops had to clear out the surviving Japs with flamethrowers and bayonets. The Stars and Stripes flew over that pile of wreckage, too. Les was proud to see the Star-Spangled Banner waving, but he wasn’t sorry to have missed that fight. He’d been in enough of them, and then some.

The rest of Honolulu wasn’t in much better shape. Even the buildings that still stood had pieces bitten out of them. The Japs had made a stand, or tried to, in just about every stone or brick building in town. They’d taken it out on civilians, too, which only added to the stench in the air.

Les sighed, thinking of what was left of the honky-tonks on Hotel Street: not bloody much. “This town is never gonna be the same,” he said.

“This whole island is never gonna be the same,” Dutch Wenzel said. “Pineapples? Sugar cane? All that crap’s down the drain now. Nothin’ but fuckin’ rice paddies left. The Doles’ll be on the dole, by God.” He laughed at his own wit.

So did Les. “Who’s gonna worry about any of that for a while?” he said. “Who’s gonna worry about cleaning up this mess here, either? Only thing anybody’s gonna give a damn about is getting this place ready to fight from. Hickam and Wheeler are up again, so the carriers don’t all have to hang around, but Christ only knows how long it’ll be before we can use Pearl again.”

“Tell me about it,” Wenzel said. “More wrecks in there-ours and the Japs’-than you can shake a stick at. All the fuel burned or blown up, the repair yards smashed to scrap… It’ll be a while yet.”

“Reckon so.” Les lit a cigarette, partly to fight the stink from his friend’s cigar. He looked north and west.

“Even before then, we’ve gotta clear those bastards off of Midway and Wake-especially Midway. I won’t be sorry to get rid of Washing Machine Charlie.” Bettys from Midway could reach Oahu. Every few nights, a handful of them would buzz overhead, drop their bombs, and then head for home. They were only an annoyance… unless one of those bombs happened to come down on you.

Wenzel nodded. “Yeah, the sooner that starts, the better. And after we take care of those places-well, it’s wherever we go next, that’s all.”

“Wherever the fuck it is, they’ll need Marines,” Les said positively. Dutch Wenzel nodded again. Both of them looked west, towards islands whose names and dangers they didn’t know. Les blew out a cloud of smoke. “Wonder how many of us’ll be left by the time it’s all over. Enough, I expect.” Dutch nodded one more time.

ONLY A FEW HUNDRED JAPANESE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS had been captured in the downfall of Oahu. The Americans kept them in a camp not far from Pearl City, near the northern tip of Pearl Harbor.

Yasuo Furusawa suspected one reason the Americans did that was to let their prisoners watch them at work. Getting Pearl Harbor usable again would have taken Japan years, if the Japanese had tried at all. Furusawa would have judged it an impossibly big job. The Americans threw more machines at it than he would have guessed there were in all the home islands put together. They had plenty of fuel, too, even if they were bringing every liter of it from the mainland.

And things got done. Sunken ships were raised. Some were refloated for repair. Torches attacked others, turning them into scrap metal. Buildings went up on the shore and on Ford Island. It all happened so fast, it reminded him of a movie run at the wrong speed.

“We didn’t know how strong they were when we started fighting them,” he said gloomily as he stood in line for rations. Even those were a sign of U.S. might. He ate more and better as an American prisoner than he had as a soldier of the Japanese Empire. He remembered what his own side had fed American POWs, and how they’d looked after a while. The comparison was daunting.

The prisoner in front of him only shrugged. “What difference does it make?” he said. “What difference does anything make? We’ve disgraced ourselves. Our families will hate us forever.”

Even among the humiliated Japanese prisoners of war, a hierarchy had sprung up. Though only a senior private, Furusawa stood near the top of it. He’d been captured while unconscious. He couldn’t have fought back. Men like him and those who’d been too badly hurt to kill themselves stood ahead of those who’d simply wanted to live, those who’d thrown away their rifles and raised their hands instead of hugging a grenade to their chest or charging the Americans and dying honestly.

Several captured prisoners had already killed themselves. The Americans did their best to stop prisoners from committing suicide. Some of the captives thought that was to pile extra disgrace on them. Furusawa had at first. He didn’t any more. The Americans had rules of their own, different from Japan’s. Suicide was common among his people, but not among the Yankees. He would have said they were soft had he not faced them in battle. Even the first time around, they’d fought hard. And trying to stop their reinvasion was like trying to hold back a stream of lava with your bare hands.

Every so often, prisoners got summoned for questioning. The enemy had plenty of interrogators who spoke Japanese. Furusawa wondered how many of the locals now working for the USA had served the occupation forces before. He wouldn’t have been surprised if quite a few were doing their best to cover up a questionable past with a useful present.

Whatever they wanted to know, he answered. Why not? After the disaster of being captured, how could anything else matter? “Did you ever see or know Captain Iwabuchi, the commander of the defense in Honolulu?” an interrogator asked.

“I saw him several times, drilling his men. I never spoke to him, though, nor he to me. I was only an ordinary soldier, after all.”

The interrogator took notes. “What did you think of Captain Iwabuchi?” he asked.

“That he asked more from his men than they could hope to give him,” Furusawa said.

“Do you think there are other officers like him? Do you think there will be other defenses like this?”

“Probably,” Furusawa said. By the way the local Japanese’s mouth tightened, he hadn’t wanted to hear that. Furusawa went on, “How else would you fight a war but as hard as you can? The Americans weren’t gentle with us when they came back here, either.”

“It will only cost Japan more men in the long run,” the interrogator said. “You must have seen you can’t hope to win when America strikes with all her power.”

Furusawa had seen that. It frightened him. Even his full belly frightened him. But he said, “I am only a senior private. I just do what people tell me to do. If you had caught a general, maybe you could talk to him about such things.”

“We caught a lieutenant colonel and two majors-one was knocked cold like you, the others both badly wounded,” the interrogator said. “Everyone of higher rank is dead. Almost all of the men of those ranks are dead, too.”

“I am not surprised,” Furusawa said. “You have won a battle here. I cannot tell you anything different. But the war still has a long way to go.”

They brought him back to the camp after that. He watched four-engined bombers take off from Hickam Field-one more facility repaired far faster than he would have thought possible. The huge planes roared off toward the northwest. The war still had a long way to go, and the Americans were getting on with it.

FLETCHER ARMITAGE FILLED OUT HIS UNIFORM better than he had the last time he came into Wahiawa. Looking at himself in the mirror, comparing himself to people who hadn’t almost starved to death, he judged he was all the way up to very skinny. From where he’d started, that showed a hell of a lot of progress.

Wahiawa had made progress, too. They’d bulldozed rubble off the streets. Some of the long-dead automobiles parked along Kamehameha Highway were gone, too. More people were on the sidewalk. Like Fletch, they had more flesh than the last time he was here.

He tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Why don’t you park?”

“Whatever you say, sir,” the soldier answered cheerfully. He pulled over. Several big trucks painted olive drab rumbled by, heading south. Fletch wondered what they were carrying to Honolulu or Pearl Harbor. Both places still needed everything under the sun. He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. His worries were right here.

Walking to the apartment where he’d lived with Jane was easier this time. He didn’t get tired so fast. Exercise was starting to feel good again. He wasn’t doing too much without the strength to do it, the way he had while he was a POW. No Jap sergeant was going to whack him with a length of bamboo or a rifle butt if he slowed down, either.

But he didn’t have to slow down now. He went up the stairs at a good clip. He did raise his hand twice before he knocked on the door, but that was nerves, not weakness. So he told himself, anyway.

She won’t be home, he thought. But the door opened. “Oh,” Jane said. “It’s you. Come in.” She stepped aside to let him.

“You were expecting Cary Grant?” he asked with a crooked smile.

Jane laughed-sourly. “I wasn’t expecting anybody. People know I had to do… what I did. But they know I did it, too. They don’t come around much.” She closed the door, then turned to look him over.

“You seem better. You don’t look like you’d blow away in a strong breeze any more.”

“I put a roll of quarters in my pocket before I came down, just to make sure,” Fletch answered. This time, Jane really laughed. His eyes traveled her. “You’ve always looked good to me, babe.”

She stared down at the ratty rug. “Even after all that?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I know about doing things you wouldn’t do if you had a choice. Believe me, I do. The tank traps and bunkers and trenches I dug probably got our guys killed after they came back. You think I wanted to do that? But the Japs would’ve murdered me if I told ’em no, so-I dug.”

Jane took that in a direction he hadn’t expected, murmuring, “Killed.” She eyed him. “Have you ever killed anybody? Known you killed somebody, I mean?”

Artillerymen usually fought at ranges where they couldn’t see what happened when their shells came down-usually, but not always. He’d used a 105 as a direct-fire weapon when the Japs invaded Oahu.

“Yeah,” he said, and told her about blowing an enemy tank to hell and gone. Then he asked, “How come?”

“Because I did, too, or I think I did.” She told him about Annabelle Chung. “While I was doing it, it felt like the right thing. Sometimes it still does. But sometimes I just want to be sick, you know what I mean?”

“If anybody ever had it coming, babe, she did,” Fletch said. “You weren’t the only one who thought so, either, if it makes you feel any better.”

Jane nodded. “I tell myself that. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it doesn’t.” She made a wry face. “The last couple of years, a lot of things have happened that can’t be helped.”

“Ain’t it the truth!” Fletch said with more feeling than grammar. “But maybe some can.” Awkwardly, he dropped to one knee. “Hon, since the divorce never got finished, will you please stay married to me?”

Jane stared at him. Then she started to laugh again. “You didn’t do that the first time you proposed to me!”

“Well, I know you better now, and I mean it more, too,” he said. “And I’ll try to be a better husband, too. I won’t promise the moon, but I’ll try. So will you?”

“Get up, silly,” she said softly. “Will I?” She seemed to be asking him as much as herself. Slowly, she nodded. “I think I will, if you’re crazy enough to still want me. We’ll see how it goes, I guess. And if it doesn’t… one of us’ll file papers again, that’s all.”

“Sure.” Fletch agreed more because he didn’t feel like arguing than because he wanted to think about papers and lawyers and all the other delights he’d known just before the Japs invaded. But he’d known other delights since; next to time as a Japanese prisoner, even lawyers didn’t look so bad. Next to hell, purgatory probably seemed a pretty nice part of town. He grunted a little as he got to his feet. “Thank you, babe!”

“Don’t thank me yet, Fletch,” Jane said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re still on probation. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, I will go back to a lawyer.” She eyed him with mock-he hoped it was mock-severity. “That’s a threat, buster. You’re not supposed to grin like a fool after I make a threat.”

“No, huh? Not even when I’m happy?” Fletch pulled the corners of his mouth down, using one index finger for each corner. “There. Is that better?” he asked, blurrily, fingers still in place.

Jane snorted. “So help me God, you’re crazy as a bedbug.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.” Fletch saluted her with as much precision as if he were a plebe back at West Point. “May I please kiss the bride to be, wife to be, whatever-the-heck to be, ma’am?”

Most of the time, after you’d just more or less proposed and she said yes, the answer to that was automatic. Looking at Jane’s face, he knew it wasn’t here. When he remembered why, some of his own joy chilled within him. But she nodded after a couple of seconds. “Carefully,” she said.

“Carefully,” he promised.

He held her with as much formal reserve as if they were waltzing together for the first time. She closed her eyes and raised her chin, looking about one-quarter eager and three-quarters scared to death. He kissed her. It was more than a brush of his lips across hers, but less than half of what he wanted it to be: the same sort of kiss he’d given her the last time he came back here.

When it was over, he let her go right away. “Okay?” he asked.

She nodded again. “Okay. Thank you.” She looked out the window, across the room-anywhere but at him. “This won’t be easy. I’m sorry. If you want to change your mind, I can see why you would.”

“Not me,” he said. “I figured there’d be bumps in the road. But hey-at least there’s a road. The last couple of years…” He didn’t go on, or need to. “So let’s do like you said-we’ll see how it goes, and we’ll go from there. Deal?”

“Deal.” Jane held out her hand.

Fletch shook it. “And I brought you another present, too.” He pulled out two packs of Luckies.

“Wow!” She all but snatched them out of his hands. “The way things are, they’re better than roses.” She opened a pack and stuck a cigarette in her mouth. He lit it for her. “Wow!” she said again after the first drag.

“I better go,” Fletch said. She didn’t tell him to stay, however much he wished she would have. He paused with his hand on the knob. “One more thing. If they ship me out-no, when they ship me out-I’ll be paying those bastards back for you.”

“Yeah.” Jane took another deep drag on the Lucky. “That’s a deal, too, Fletch.”

AUTUMN. For more than thirty years, it had been only a word to Jiro Takahashi. It was always summer in Hawaii. A little warmer, a little cooler, a little drier, a little wetter-so what? Summer, endless summer.

But now, against all odds, he was back in Japan, and he had to remember what seasons were like. Southern Honshu had always prided itself on its good weather, with the Inland Sea helping to keep things moderate. Jiro supposed it wasn’t as bad here as it was up in Hokkaido, where they got real blizzards every winter. It still seemed chilly and nasty to him.

I’ve been spoiled, he thought.

The authorities were doing their best to keep him happy. His broadcasts from Hawaii had made him something of a celebrity in the home islands. A grumpy celebrity wasn’t good.

He thought he would have been happier if they’d let him stay next door in Yamaguchi Prefecture, where he’d been born. He’d visited his old village. He had a brother and a sister there, and a few old acquaintances. It proved more awkward than he’d expected; no one knew what to say. After so many years apart, he didn’t have much in common with family or former friends.

Maybe the people who ran things were smart to keep him in a big city. He could visit again whenever he wanted to-if he wanted to. Yamaguchi Prefecture remained overwhelmingly rural. It was livelier than it had been when he left, but next to the hustle and bustle he’d known in Honolulu it seemed, if not dead, then very, very sleepy.

For instance, it had no town with first-rate broadcasting facilities. They wanted to keep him on the radio, as if his broadcasts could somehow compensate for the loss of Hawaii. Nobody ever came right out and said Hawaii was lost; it just stopped showing up in the news. Jiro hoped his sons had come through the fighting. He also hoped they were happy under American rule once more. He knew he wouldn’t have been-and he knew the Americans wouldn’t have been happy with him.

He got off the trolley at the stop closest to the studio. It was only a block or two from the domed Industrial Promotion Hall in the center of town. When he looked north, the Chugoku-sanshi Range loomed over the city skyline. The mountains didn’t have snow on them yet, but they would by the time winter was over. He hadn’t even seen snow since coming to Oahu. He supposed seeing it wasn’t so bad. Dealing with it… If he had to, he had to, that was all.

“Hello, Takahashi-san.” The local broadcaster’s name was Junchiro Hozumi. He reminded Jiro of a cheap imitation of Osami Murata. He cracked crude, stupid jokes and breathed in your face to show how friendly he was. He did have a smooth baritone, though. He said, “Today shall we talk about how you came back to Japan?”

Jiro thought about that. He remembered how terribly overcrowded the submarine was, and how the stink almost knocked you off your feet. He remembered the heart-pounding fear as the boat sneaked, submerged, past the American ships that had by then surrounded Oahu. He remembered the shrill pings of the enemy’s echo-tracker, and the crash and boom of bursting depth charges. He remembered how the submarine shook, as if in an undersea earthquake. And he remembered how fear turned to terror.

Did Hozumi understand what he was asking? Did he want his listeners hearing things like that? What would the government do to him-and to Jiro- if they went out over the air? Nothing good; Jiro was sure of that. As tactfully as he could, he said, “Maybe we’d better pick something else, Hozumi-san.”

For a wonder, Hozumi got the message. His grin was wide and friendly and showed a gold front tooth.

“Whatever you say. How about being able to eat proper rice now that you’re in the home islands again?”

“All right. We can do that,” Jiro said. The rice here was better than the horrible slop he’d eaten after the occupation started. The ration was larger than the one people on Oahu had got, too-not a whole lot larger, but larger. He could talk about that and let people here think he was talking about the whole time he’d lived in Hawaii. He’d begun to understand how the game was played.

The studio reminded him of the one at KGMB from which he and Murata had broadcast. The routine seemed much the same, too. Had the Japanese borrowed from the Americans? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Even the engineers’ signals through the glass were the same.

“Good job,” Hozumi said when the program was done. “Good job!”

“Arigato,” Jiro said. He’d got through another one, anyhow.

When he left the studio, he took the trolley down to the shore and stared out across the Inland Sea at Itaku Shima, the Island of Light. From time out of mind, the tiny island had been dedicated to the goddess Bentin. The chief temple was more than 1,300 years old. Pilgrims came to visit from all over Japan.

Hawaii didn’t have anything like that. Jiro nodded to himself. Even if the weather here couldn’t match what he’d left, Hiroshima wasn’t such a bad place after all.